Having Inter­net Explorer to play nice with the new web standards has been web devel­op­er’s dream for a long time—I know I have long wanted that—but sadly that wasn’t hap­pening. Then came Google re­leas­ing a plu­gin that ba­sically lets Google Chrome’s WebKit-based rendering en­g­ine han­dle the rendering of a page, it was a great news.

A hack is any­thing that has the po­tential to fail disas­trously each time some­thing changes expectedly.

kroc camen

For the longest time, web devel­op­ers have been struggling to get their websites to render just as any oth­er brows­er would. The lim­i­tations of Inter­net Explorer made it almost impos­sible un­less some sort of work arounds or ie spe­cif­ic hacks that forces ie to play nice but as Kroc Camen pointed out “A hack is any­thing that has the po­tential to fail disas­trously each time some­thing changes expectedly.”

[…] Google Chrome Frame running as a plu­gin has dou­bled the attach area for malware and ma­licious scripts. This is not a risk we would rec­ommend our friends and fam­i­lies take.

The thing is Microsoft’s frus­tratingly slow adoption of the web standards forced people to come up with not so el­egant solutions. It is also true that ie plu­gins would cre­ate an additional opportunity for hacker to exploit but for Microsoft to say the plu­gin is not safe is not help­ing at all. The prob­lem was cre­ated by Microsoft in the first place and in­stead of fixing the prob­lem, they tell people that the people who offer a solution—not a very good one, but a solution nonethe­less—that they didn’t do a good job covering the mess Microsoft cre­ated in the first place. Google wouldn’t need to come up with Google Chrome Frame if ie renders new standards prop­erly, because as much as we like to stop support­ing ie, big compa­nies cannot ignore 65% of the people who surfs the web us­ing ie.

The performance of the scripting en­g­ine has lit­tle discernible impact on today’s web pages, […] a faster JavaScript en­g­ine would offer no practical val­ue to end users.

Web standard is only a fraction of ie’s prob­lem, we’ve seen a massive improve­ments on javascript capa­bilities on all major brows­er to bring near native speed javascript performance so that much more so­phis­ticated web applications can be cre­ated. Microsoft’s response to these trends? “The performance of the scripting en­g­ine has lit­tle discernible impact on today’s web pages, […] a faster JavaScript en­g­ine would offer no practical val­ue to end users.”.

I am not go­ing to com­ment on how ignorant that com­ment was but I will say that if Microsoft con­tinues to ignore the open standard and keep push­ing pro­pri­etary technology like Silver­light, they will only con­tinue to see it’s brows­er’s mar­ket share plummet.

As much as we all like to de­stroy ie, what needs to be done is to stop support­ing an­cient browsers like ie 6 and force us­er to switch to up to date, standard compli­ant browsers.